(Photo by Flickr user Douglas Muth, used under a Creative Commons license)

William Entrikenwants to analyze Philadelphia Traffic Court data. But the data, the court says, is going to cost him.

$11,200, to be exact.

Entriken, a financial analyst and civic hacker, requested a list of court cases tried in traffic court since 2005. As part of his project, he wants to know which cases were ultimately lowered to a “3111” violation, a type of ticket where, if you plead guilty, you pay a fine but get no points on your license. Entriken wants to analyze the data to see if there was anything shady going on with these types of tickets.

Because it isn’t readily available, according to Marc Flood, the deputy court administrator for the Philadelphia Courts, which oversees Traffic Court.

The $11,200 price tag is quoted from Xerox, which manages the traffic court’s data. Xerox said it would have to create a program that would scan the database to identify all the cases with a 3111 violation. That’s roughly 60 hours of work time, according to Xerox, and work time doesn’t come cheap under the courts’ public access policy. It’s $85 an hour for staff time and $300 an hour for computer time.

That adds up, quick.

Under the state’s Right to Know Law, agencies are not allowed to pass on labor costs to a data requestor, said Nathanael Byerly, deputy director of the state’s Office of Open Records. But Philadelphia’s courts are governed by a different policy: their own public access policy, which allows the courts to pass on labor costs for data requests.

So Entriken, who previously built an app that showed how often SEPTA‘s Regional Rail was late, is raising $17,000 on Kickstarter to get the data (the higher number is to account for Kickstarter fees, and, Entriken says, the potential of the city raising its initial price for the data).

This is a unique data request, said court administrator Flood, who generally fields requests for a copy of a document out of a file, rather than a request for a large electronic file. Those more common types of requests are generally free, he said.

Unfortunately, it isn’t, said MuckRock editor J. Patrick Brown. He pointed to one instance where MuckRock had to pay for data, though the staff-time rates were much lower.

Still, Brown said, “it’s not unusual to see those types of rates.”

One reason the rates might be so high is because a private corporation is managing the data. It’s somewhat common in the Philadelphia courts, where each court has a different data manager, Flood said. For instance:

This is exactly why the civic hacking scene (and orgs like Sunlight Foundation) exist. $11k for data we have a right to obtain? 60 hours for a database query? $300 for “computer time?”

What is this, 1980?

Here’s a better idea – give us the whole data dump and we’ll take it from there. Certainly an indiscriminate data pull would take a LOT less time and money. I’ll even send over the external hard drive, if it’s too big.

Allison Kelsey

No wonder Headd quit.

William Entriken

Chris, I’m on board! More data and hacking… I was literally born for this task. Not that this is out I’m going to follow up with the court and see if there is any way they can produce more data (with any confidential data removed if necessary) and leave the legwork to me and other interested parties. Thanks for the idea.

Sorry, but this is total bullshit. Unless the dollar exchange rate in Philadelphia is off by a factor of 100x from the rest of the United States, $11,200 is not an acceptable fee for the database query and schema as described in this article and in the example layout given in the Kickstarter request. No competent public records reporter would ever agree to such a fee for a dataset with these characteristics. Even city payroll records, which may require several joins and some scrubbing to obscure confidential data, do not call for anything remotely near $11,000. The city of Philadelphia is either dishonestly stonewalling or is being bilked at an exorbitant rate by Xerox for routine computing services. Both of those are more worth looking into than the investigation into parking tickets.